“that meagre and fragile thread… by which the little surface corners and edges of men’s secret and solitary lives may be joined for an instant now and then before sinking back into the darkness where the spirit cried for the first time and was not heard and will cry for the last time and will not be heard then either”

-from Absolom, Absolom! by William Faulkner.

photo: Flowers from the Fall, 2009. ©Graeme Mitchell.

photo: Flowers from the Fall, 2009. ©Graeme Mitchell.

photo: Flowers from the Fall, 2009. ©Graeme Mitchell.

“his very body was an empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names; he was not a being, an entity, he was a commonwealth.  He was a barracks filled with stubborn, back-looking ghosts…”

-from Absolom, Absolom! by William Faulkner.

photo: Flowers from the Fall, 2009. ©Graeme Mitchell.

photo: Flowers from the Fall, 2009. ©Graeme Mitchell.

photo: Flowers from the Fall, 2009. ©Graeme Mitchell.

We have a few old mouth-to-mouth tales, we exhume from old trunks and boxes and drawers letters without salutation or signature, in which men and women who once lived and breathed are now merely initials or nicknames out of some now incomprehensible affection which sound to us like Sanskrit or Chocktaw; we see dimly people, the people in whose living blood and seed we ourselves lay dormant and waiting, in this shadowy attenuation of time possessing now heroic proportions, performing their acts of simple passion and simple violence, impervious to time and inexplicable

-from Absolom, Absolom! by William Faulkner.

photo: Flowers from the Fall, 2009. ©Graeme Mitchell.

photo: Flowers from the Fall, 2009. ©Graeme Mitchell.

photo: Flowers from the Fall, 2009. ©Graeme Mitchell.

photo: Franz Roh, 1926, by Lucia Moholy

And then this is a portrait of Lucia by her husband and photographer, László Moholy-Nagy.  Both of these pictures are really something else.

photo: portrait of Lucia Moholy by László Moholy-Nagy

At nearly the same time as the Moholys, the painter Balthus was in Paris reaching a stride that would define his work as controversial, erotic, and, I think, brilliant.  It’s great to read his biography revolving around his early years in Paris and the circles he ran in, including, Giacometti, Many Ray, Camus, Miró, Picasso, Lacan.  The heavy hitters of culture, those that shaped our modern and even our post-modern sensibilities.  Which brings me to a discussion I was having last night w/ a friend in regards to movements in the arts and culture, those little sparks that ignite and burn and sometimes manage to change everything thereafter.  Namely we talked about how they’ve always been geographically based and how the internet has changed that old need to actually be somewhere and in a physically community to participate (Post-war Paris, NYC in the 50s and 80s, as two modern Western examples).  Does physical dissipation lead to cultural dissipation?  I think so.  Does that kind of ruin, or at least make much more difficult, the chances for those paradigm shifts of culture, the arts, and how people think?  Maybe.  Sure, it’s an over simplified view, b/c I really don’t know what I’m talking about, but I figure it’s something to roll around in your head while we have this discussion.  (Over our computers…oh, the irony).

painting: by Balthus

Anyway, there’s an excellent portrait of Balthus by Irving Penn, w/ Balthus in a chair wearing a robe and a belt made of simple rope, with that infinite air of human-ess reaching into eternity that Penn instilled in so many of his sitters.  I’d seen it in one of Penn’s books, and thought it’d go nicely here, but can’t find it online anywhere, so I guess for now the internet does have it’s limits.

Painter’s and photographer’s makes me think of George Bernard Shaw’s quote that if Velazquez was alive today he’d be a photographer.  I mean, could you imagine!  Conde Naste contract.  B/c the guy sorta was doing what Leibovitz does, except he did it over 300 years ago w/ a paint brush

painting: Las Meninas, 1665, by Diego Velazquez

Shaw, now there is a mind!  The guy must have been a photographers dream: self aware, smart, and, the icing, the cliche look of a wise man.  I mean, he was someone who believed death was only real b/c it was an idea put in our head, an idea that one really didn’t have to abide by.  Faaarrrrr out.  I guess he took the Nietzschian ubermensch literally.  If you want to get to know him, his plays Major Barbara and Man and Superman would be the two I’d suggest as seminal.

photo: George Bernard Shaw, ©The Estate of Yousuf Karsh

The threads holding this post together were thin to begin with, and they’ve completely disintegrated by this point.  So I’ll spare you any more of what was on my mind and will instead bid you adieu.

Facing the Music
by Paul Auster

Blue.  And within that blue a feeling
of green, the gray blocks of clouds
buttressed against air, as if
in the idea of rain
the eye
could master the speech
of any given moment

on earth.  Call it the sky.  And so
to describe
whatever it is
we seem, as if it is nothing
but the idea
of something we had lost
within.  for we can begin
to remember

the hard earth, the flint
reflecting stars, the undulating
oaks set loose
by the heaving of air, and so down
to the least seed, revealing what grows
above us, as if
because of this blue there could be
this green

that spreads, myriad
and miraculous
in this, the most silent
moment of summer.  Seeds
speak of this juncture, define
where the air and the earth erupt
in this profusion of chance, the random
forces of our own lack
of knowing what it is
we see, and merely to speak of it
is to see
how words fail us, how nothing comes right
in the saying of it, not even these words
I am moved to speak
in the name of this blue
and green
that vanish into the air
of summer.

Impossible
to hear it anymore.  The tongue
is forever taking us away
from where we are, and nowhere
can we be at rest
in the things we are given
to see, for each word
is an elsewhere, a thing that moves
more quickly than the eye, even
as this sparrow moves, veering
into the air
in which it has no home.  I believe, then,
in nothing

these words might give you, and still
I can feel them
speaking through me, as if
this alone
is what I desire, this blue
and this green, and to say
how this blue
has become for me the essence
of this green, and more than the pure
seeing of it, I want you to feel
this word
that has lived inside me
all day long, this
desire for nothing

but the day itself, and how it has grown
inside my eyes, stronger
than the word it is made of, as if
there could ever be another word

that would hold me
without breaking.

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell

‘I always wanted you to admire my fasting,’ the hunger-artist said. ‘And so we do,’ the foreman said obligingly. ‘But you shouldn’t admire it,’ the hunger-artist said. ‘Well, all right, we don’t,’ said the foreman, “but why shouldn’t we?” ‘Because I have to fast, I can’t help it,’ the hunger-artist said. ‘Well, I’m blowed,’ said the foreman, ‘and why can’t you help it?’ ‘Because,’ the hunger-artist began, lifting his head a little and, with lips pursed as if for a kiss, speaking right into the foreman’s ear lest anything be lost, ‘because I’ve never been able to find the kind of nourishment I like. If I had found it, believe you me, I’d not have made this fuss but would have eaten my fill the same as you and everyone else.’ Those were his last words, but his shattered gaze retained the firm if no longer proud conviction that he was fasting yet.

from Franz Kafka’s short story, The Hunger Artist.

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell

So, lay back and close your eyes, b/c I doubt you’re going to find this anyplace else.

“The Holy Dove Was Moving Too,” written and read by Haven Kimmel.

Haven has a number of bestsellers riddling the shelf.  Go and seek out.

[Change of topic]

Note: my posting here has been pretty thin lately.  I’ve been busy.  I’ve been busy working on things I’m not in a hurry to go on about here.  It’s not my intention to talk work work on this site, at least not in depth.  Yes, I’ll drop a post updating the occasional happenings, but only so things don’t wilt here.  I suspect these are the thinnest posts.  You see, the original purpose of this site was to share the NYC Journal and other work I do that would be otherwise homeless, and also to talk about photography in the most whimsical sense of an art and of what lights the fires in my head and heart.  I have no interest in using this site as a marketing tool.  Why am I bringing this up?  B/c I’ve realized, as I’ve become busier, how the original intent of this blog was very time intensive.  The NYC Journal alone is something that I used to spend days on a week, while right now it’s lucky to get a handful of hours in the week.  But I’m not complaining, only letting you know I’m learning and making adjustments to keep things going here.   Note concluded.

On that note,,,

[Change of topic yet again]

a few random pics:

photo: London, 2009. ©Graeme Mitchell.

photo: London, 2009. ©Graeme Mitchell.

photo: London, 2009. ©Graeme Mitchell.

photo: London, 2009. ©Graeme Mitchell.

photo: London, 2009. ©Graeme Mitchell.

photo: London, 2009. ©Graeme Mitchell.

photo: London, 2009. ©Graeme Mitchell.

photo: London, 2009. ©Graeme Mitchell.

Also read Beckett and chain smoked on the beach.  No, not Camus, but still…

yay

Then to London for some of their fashion week parties, meetings with mags.  Tried to spend time on the street shooting, but the streets of that city: stoic (read, snore), so I began to wonder if there ever was a seminal London street photographer?  Other than the bit of work Robert Frank did (in Wales?), but I couldn’t think of anyone…?  Anyone?

photo: from the book Robert Frank: London/Wales, © Robert Frank.

Then home, I hit Penn station out of Newark on Monday eve rush hour and the train station was like firecrackers going off everyplace, felt remarkable to be back in the crazy.  Never satiated with that, never ever.  Gluttonous for the madness.

IN THE STATION METRO
By Ezra Pound
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

(That’s a well known imagest poem that was part of a one of the more short lived art movements dubbed, Vorticism, which also had it proponents in photography.  The photography bit. though ambitious in theory, was to not such great effect I think.  The best part was what it was called, Vortography, which would not be, I imagine, an easy moniker to live up to…yeah, in retrospect, the name may have been the origin of the movements failing.

photo: Vortograph by Alvin Langdon Coburn

).

Update, I just confirmed a job on the W. Coast for next week, fly out today, so I’ll be gone again for a week…maybe two.  The blog goes neglected again.  Golly.

I guess in the meantime, cruise to the newsstands and take a look at Katie Grand’s (formerly the force behind POP) new mag, LOVE.  Maybe not amazing yet, but most certainly promising.

photo: cover of first issue of LOVE magazine, Beth Ditto, photo by Mert and Marcus.

That or – going back to Beckett – read his trilogy if you haven’t.  I’d tried twice and never made it much further than Molloy, but I guess I’ve come to a place where I can read it and be absorbed by it, absorbed.  Someone said once, I forget who, that you really can’t read/enjoy/understand the greats until you yourself have lived for awhile, lived the things that the books are about.  Not that I’m old and wise, gawdnoiamnot, but suddenly the long long winded Russians seem exciting and Molly Bloom’s soliloquy at the close of Ulysses seems, uhhh, doable.  I do hope by my 40s I’ll be able to get to Finnegan’s Wake, and even develop the patience for poetry.

[...]you must go on, I can’t go on, you must go on, I’ll go on, you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it’s done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have caried me to the threshold of my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.

-from The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett

That takes me to a different world.  Yes it does.

photo: “Massachusetts – John Updike, 1962.  ©Dennis Stock / Magnum.

“We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.”
-John Updike

…though I much prefer,

“Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.”
-John Updike

(!  Goodgod, now. That’s fine fine prose.)

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008

(And maybe you noticed that I increased the image size.  This should have been done a long time ago.  A lot of these images really need to be seen bigger (a cliche line from the photographer if ever there was one).  The template I use is limited, but maybe the little bump will make them more enjoyable.  Let me know if it’s an improvement, if it slows things down too much, or if it makes no difference?)

(

photo: E.E. Cummings, 1953, by Walter Albertin for New York World Telegram

)

Makes me think of smoking poets and then of Richard Prince‘s Untitled (Cowboy):

photo: Untitled (Cowboy) (1989), ©Richard Prince.

And that’s plenty for now.

Tons.  Masses.

Like when at the MOMA the other day and I saw for the first time Edvard Munch’s The Storm.

painting: The Storm (1893) by Edvard Munch.

I couldn’t possibly look at anything after that – it was entirely too much already.

Super short post, but they should be good reading for awhile.

Oh, and a movie: someone sent me some segments of a flim William Klein did in 1986 called Contacts.  Worth digging up if you can find it.

Oh, and speaking of Helmut and back to the topic of yesterdays post of Avedon’s sartorial sense, check out the snakeskin belt (↓)!

photo: Helmut Newton. ©David Hurn/Magnum.

photo: “Canal Street – New Orleans, 1955″ from The Americans, ©Robert Frank.

photo: “Robert Frank, photographer, Mabou Mines, Nova Scotiam July 17, 1975″ ©Richard Avedon.

(Of course another artist initialed R.F. who defined a sort of America

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

“The Road Not Taken”
-Robert Frost

.)

And as much as I try to avoid regurgitation by linking to blog posts elsewhere, this interview with Chris Buck is enough for an exception, part 1 and part 2.

photo: Philip-Lorca diCorcia for PDN magazine, ©Chris Buck.

That portrait by Chris is of, as you probably know, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, who’s work isn’t trivial.  I thought he’d be a good end note to kick the week off with.

photo: “Gianni,” ©Philip-lorca diCorcia.

To say this short film is visually remarkable is a remarkable understatement.  And further, the minimal creativity of it will make you long for a time when work like this was conceived, let alone completed.  It’s at once brilliant and beautiful, which are two things not easy to couple.  Needless to say, it got into my head b/c I’ve never really seen anything like it.

But watch it for yourself, here in 3 parts.  It might be one of the best half hours of your week.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

(Amy also mentioned on her blog that there is a book version of La Jetée‘s images with the narrative as text by MIT press (here).  My notion is that it’d be excellent.)

(Also, it occurred to me by the end that this short was the inspiration for 12 Monkeys.)

(And while we’re on the video blitz of gloom.  T.S. Eliot’s great poem “The Hollow Men” as recited by Marlon Brando (playing Kurtz in Apocolypse Now (Redux version), which makes sense, b/c one of Eliot’s main inspirations for “Hollow Men” was Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, which as you know was the basis of Apocalypse Now.  The film does leave out the opening line of Eliot’s poem, “Mistah Kurtz – he dead”):

“This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but with a whimper”
-final stanza of “The Hollow Men”

photo: T.S. Eliot at his desk, Jan 18, 1944. ©Bob Landry/Life Images.

…)

And it comes full circle, B/c the French film maker Chris Marker who did La Jetée also did a multimedia installation on Eliot’s “Hollow Men” titled OWLS AT NOON Prelude: The Hollow Men.  I’ve not seen it nor can I find it.

photo: Katie Van Camp, NYC, 2008.  ©Graeme Mitchell.

photo: Maureen Mitchell, Canby, OR., Sept 2008. © Graeme Mitchell.

I was taking these immediately after looking through some photo albums with my mom, snaps from child-hood of us in gondolas, of us petting odd animals, of us dressed up.  Upon realizing my early childhood is at best scattered, illusive fragments as far as my memory goes, I commented to my mom, it’s amazing how little we remember, you know, how forgetting it so natural…  She offered in response (with not a trace of irony), that’s a good thing.

Dark, Dukes, for God’s sake, dark.

photo: David Mitchell, Canby, OR., Sept 2008. © Graeme Mitchell.

Also, a poem the author, Haven Kimmel had sent me:

OCEANS

     I have a feeling that my boat
has struck, down there in the depths,
against a great thing.
                  And nothing  happens!
Nothing . . . Silence . . . Waves. . . .

--Nothing happens? Or has everything happened,
and we are standing now, quietly, in the new life?

Juan Ramon Jimenez
tr. Robert Bly

Which for some reason I think makes sense perfectly here.

photo: Wilmington, North Carolina, 1977. © John Rosenthal

And of this second picture I’ll quote Kimmel again who explained the print to me, “Rosenthal was walking through a cemetery in Wilmington, NC, and he came across this man digging a grave.  It turns out it was the family’s cemetery for three generations, and they allowed no machinery over the graves, so everything was dug by hand.  Bellamy [the gravedigger] was a man of intense pride and dignity.  Rosenthal asked him if he could take a photograph of him, and Bellamy, ‘You may take one.’  And this is it:”

photo: Pine Hill Cemetery, Wilmington, NC, 1990. © John Rosenthal

I feel like the universe just grew.

Making work that is autotelic like this is something…well, let’s just say it’s not exactly the style of the moment; that is, creating with politics that refuse conventional politics/content – and it’ll have trouble ever becoming fashionable b/c in a way it is something that has to be done in silence, and silence, needless to say, doesn’t sell.  To be clear, I don’t write here thinking in terms of the old Romantic vain of l’art pour l’art, but I mean something in the post-post-modernly sense of, say, the “inaesthetics” of Alain Badiou, were art can be “immenent” and not mimesis (see his text, The Handbook of Inaesthetics).  Though, stubbornly, I’m still grappling with the mathematical and inhuman definitions of art in Badiou’s approach, but that is another discussion for another time.

Philadelphia, 1963. © Ray Metzker.

Pictus Interruptus, 1977. © Ray Metzker

photo: Chuck Close’s studio entrance, Bond St. NYC.

Much on earth is concealed from us, but in the place of it we have been granted a secret, a mysterious sense of our living bond with the other world, with the higher heavenly world, and the roots of our our thoughts and feelings are not here but in other worlds.  That is why philosophers say it is impossibly on earth to conceive the essence of things.  God took seeds from other worlds and sowed them on this earth, and raised up his garden; and everything that could sprout sprouted, and it lives and grows on through its sense of being in touch with other mysterious worlds; if this sense is weakened and destroyed in you, that which has grown up in you dies.  Then you become indifferent to life, and even come to hate it.  So I think.

-from The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Anyway, enough of that.

photo: my Grandpa, Lloyd Gauley, at the Sportsman Club, June 08.  ©Graeme Mitchell.

I thought of just sharing the above picture, but here are two more.

photo: my Grandma and Grandpa in their chairs, June 08.  ©Graeme Mitchell.

photo: my Grandma and Grandpa not in their chairs, June 08.  ©Graeme Mitchell.

audio: William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Delivered, Dec 10, 1950 in Stockholm Sweden

photo: William Faulkner, Hollywood, CA, 1942. ©Alfred Eriss/Pix Inc./Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

“Human existence being an hallucination containing in itself the secondary hallucination of day and night (the latter an insanitary condition of the atmosphere due to accretions of black air) it ill becomes any man of sense to be concerned at the illusory approach of the supreme hallucination known as death. -DE SELBY”

Epigraph from The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien.

photo: Umatilla, OR. © Graeme Mitchell 2008

photo: A Road to a Prison, Umatilla, OR. © Graeme Mitchell 2008

So, read O’Brien.

Oh, nearly forgot, the initial inspiration for this post was that when I read At Swim-Two-Birds Joseph Koudelka’s (w/ Magnum) work came to mind, this very special indeed image especially,

photo: “Czechoslovakia, 1960.” ©Joseph Koudelka/Magnum, 2008.

Anyway, if you’ve not taken up either of these books, I suggest to.

photo: from Immediate Family (1990), © Sally Mann.

photo: from Immediate Family (1990), © Sally Mann.

On a separate note, it’s well known too that the title of The Sound and the Fury came from the Old Bards, Macbeth. I’ve always adored the passage, which is a soliloquy of Macbeth’s (and also a friendly reminder to read more Shakespeare):

text: Macbeth, Act V, Scene V. By William Shakespeare.

photo: Eugene Pelletan, 1855-1859, by Nadar.

photo: Pierrot Laughing, 1855, by Nadar.

To close, the Baudelaire poem, Au Lecteur, or To the Reader:

Folly, error, sin, avarice
Occupy our minds and labor our bodies,
And we feed our pleasant remorse
As beggars nourish their vermin.

Our sins are obstinate, our repentance is faint;
We exact a high price for our confessions,
And we gaily return to the miry path,
Believing that base tears wash away all our stains.

On the pillow of evil Satan, Trismegist,
Incessantly lulls our enchanted minds,
And the noble metal of our will
Is wholly vaporized by this wise alchemist.

The Devil holds the strings which move us!
In repugnant things we discover charms;
Every day we descend a step further toward Hell,
Without horror, through gloom that stinks.

Like a penniless rake who with kisses and bites
Tortures the breast of an old prostitute,
We steal as we pass by a clandestine pleasure
That we squeeze very hard like a dried up orange.

Serried, swarming, like a million maggots,
A legion of Demons carouses in our brains,
And when we breathe, Death, that unseen river,
Descends into our lungs with muffled wails.

If rape, poison, daggers, arson
Have not yet embroidered with their pleasing designs
The banal canvas of our pitiable lives,
It is because our souls have not enough boldness.

But among the jackals, the panthers, the bitch hounds,
The apes, the scorpions, the vultures, the serpents,
The yelping, howling, growling, crawling monsters,
In the filthy menagerie of our vices,

There is one more ugly, more wicked, more filthy!
Although he makes neither great gestures nor great cries,
He would willingly make of the earth a shambles
And, in a yawn, swallow the world;

He is Ennui! — His eye watery as though with tears,
He dreams of scaffolds as he smokes his hookah pipe.
You know him reader, that refined monster,
— Hypocritish reader, — my fellow, — my brother!

-Charles Baudelaire
Translated by: William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)

First, Joyce by Abbott. The other day I read (I forget where) the perfect description of Joyce, calling him, the Einstein of Literature. Perfect b/c Joyce, like Einstein was a genius: a brilliant, creative mind. When you read Ulysses, you are shared the thoughts of someone who’s ability to think and use language is well beyond normal. And then when you read Finnegan’s Wake, you experience that same thing but you watch it run away from you and normal comprehension. Then you see this portrait, and you see how fragile that genius must have been. Joyce looks like he knows something we all don’t, and that thing he knows is sad…maddening even.

photo: James Joyce by Bernice Abbott, 1926.

Then two from H.C. Bresson. These speak for themselves. The Matisse (not a writer, I know, still…) portrait I think is absolutely wonderful, but, overall what strikes me as interesting about these Bresson portraits is that he was working with a sensibility that is standard convention in todays celebrity portraiture. That is: the fostering of a concept of the person. Yes, the figures Bresson was working with were famous, but it seems to me that Bresson worked to further the ethos of this public persona through his images. The painter with his birds. Camus the, uh, renegade intellectual looking, well, renegadish. Maybe what I’m seeing is obvious, but it strikes me as something I wish to applaud Bresson for: he understood the power of simplification…stereotypes if you will.

photo: Henri Matisse, Vence, France, 1944 by H.C. Bresson.

photo: Albert Camus by H.C. Bresson, 1947.

And of course Avedon… Beckett I suspect was probably one of the hardest people ever to photograph. His hyper-awareness of the situation and all levels of what was happening would probably inhibit him from any sort of action, paralyze him even. You could imagine he was a calculating man, in a good way, in a smart as hell way. Where, on the other hand, you have Pound, who would probably be easier to photograph, to say to least. Though, the fragility of his state of being might break my heart, watching him out on the fringe, precarious.

photo: Samuel Beckett, writer, Paris, April 13, 1979. ©Richard Avedon.

photo: Ezra Pound, Poet, Rutherford, New Jersey, at the home of William Carlos Williams, June 30, 1958. ©Richard Avedon.

And finally, Pynchon. The recluse. This I assume is from a old high school yearbook…?

photo: Thomas Pynchon, source unknown.

For now I’ll post Beckett’s last poem, “What is the Word.”

WHAT IS THE WORD
Samuel Beckett
for Joe Chaikin

folly
folly for to -
for to -
what is the word -
folly from this -
all this -
folly from all this -
given -
folly given all this -
seeing -
folly seeing all this -
this -
what is the word -
this this -
this this here -
all this this here -
folly given all this -
seeing -
folly seeing all this this here -
for to -
what is the word -
see -
glimpse -
seem to glimpse -
need to seem to glimpse -
folly for to need to seem to glimpse -
what -
what is the word -
and where -
folly for to need to seem to glimpse what where -
where -
what is the word -
there -
over there -
away over there -
afar -
afar away over there -
afaint -
afaint afar away over there what -
what -
what is the word -
seeing all this -
all this this -
all this this here -
folly for to see what -
glimpse -
seem to glimpse -
need to seem to glimpse -
afaint afar away over there what -
folly for to need to seem to glimpse afaint afar away over there what -
what -
what is the word -

what is the word

This poem was found on Avedon’s bathroom mirror after he died – now, this is not meant frivolously, but anytime a poem is taped to a mirror, it inherently becomes something touching and something more b/c it’s glimpsing two people, an author and reader, in a manner becoming a mirror itself. And this poem, well, this poem is moving in that it was Beckett’s last, and after a lifetime of writing, of trying to say what he needed to say through language, the poem shows him at the edge of language’s knowledge, peering into the unutterable, feeling it but unable to speak it, and still searching for more words, for that right word, and this search amounts to “folly.” It’s a beautiful poem of struggle and humility and art, and I think I can see what Avedon saw in it. (On top of Avedon, I suspect Wittgenstein would have taped this poem up someplace too.)

(More on Avedon and Beckett here.)

From the terrace, where she came out minutes later, the sun still held the yellowing heights of the maple tree on the lower lawn’s descent to a lattice fence threatening collapse under a summer exuberance of wild grape already gone a sodden yellow, brown spotted, green veined full as hands in its leaves’ lower reaches toward the fruitless torment of a wild cherry tree, limbs like the scabrous barked trunk itself wrenched, twisted, dead where one of them sported wens the size of a man’s head, cysts the size of a fist, a graceless Laocoon of a tree whose leaves where it showed them were shot through with bursts neither yellow nor not, whose branches were already careers for bittersweet just paling yellow, for the Virginia creeper in a vermilion haste to be gone.

-Carpenters Gothic. ©William Gaddis, 1985. Viking Penguin Edition. Page 36.

And a Matisse,

Landscape at Collioure. Henri Matisse, 1905

Think. What if all art, all literature, all music was stripped of it’s maker, as though it existed in an ideal of formalism, w/o context or name, and it became entirely its form and the event of experiencing it? Would this change how it affects? Only a hypothetical, since…well the idea of anonymity intrigues me greatly, but so does putting food on my plate…someday I hope I can join Pynchon on an island somewhere, be neighbors and never know it.

As I’m reading JR right now, this is a fitting Gaddis quote:

I feel like part of the vanishing breed that thinks a writer should be read and not heard, let alone seen. I think this is because there seems so often today to be a tendency to put the person in the place of his or her work, to turn the creative artist into a performing one, to find what a writer says about writing somehow more valid, or more real, than the writing itself.

-from his Nation Book Awards acceptance speech for JR in April of 1976

Andy Warhol, Green Car Crash, 1963.

Mark Rothko, White Center, 1950, Private Collection

Two of the greatest endings in Literature are F. Scott Fitzgerald’s final page to The Great Gatsby, and the other is the final paragraphs of James Joyce’s short story “The Dead” from Dubliners.

First, Fitzgerald’s picture

photo: no credit info avail, found here

and his final page of Gatsby (quoted from this full text source):

I spent my Saturday nights in New York because those gleaming, dazzling parties of his were with me so vividly that I could still hear the music and the laughter, faint and incessant, from his garden, and the cars going up and down his drive. One night I did hear a material car there, and saw its lights stop at his front steps. But I didn’t investigate. Probably it was some final guest who had been away at the ends of the earth and didn’t know that the party was over.On the last night, with my trunk packed and my car sold to the grocer, I went over and looked at that huge incoherent failure of a house once more. On the white steps an obscene word, scrawled by some boy with a piece of brick, stood out clearly in the moonlight, and I erased it, drawing my shoe raspingly along the stone. Then I wandered down to the beach and sprawled out on the sand.

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning——

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Then there is Joyce’s portrait (which I think is perfect):

photo: no credit info available, found here

and finally his closing page of “The Dead” (quoted from this full text source).

The air of the room chilled his shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one, they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover’s eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live.

Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.